A busy novel about the importance of compassion and learning to be true to one’s heart, with an endearing protagonist at its...
A chatty fourth-grader named DeeDee is eager to make friends at her new school, but first she must learn what loyalty means.
Bombarded by problems at home, DeeDee encounters more stress in one year than many people confront in a lifetime. Her trailer burns down, which means her family must move again. Her father has left to visit a relative in Mexico and hasn’t come back. She is behind in her school work and struggles to keep up with the help of a special teacher. Watched by older siblings while her mother struggles to earn a living, she eats too much junk food and develops diabetes. Readers will cheer for DeeDee even as she makes bad choices that reveal poor self-esteem: She denies being bilingual, acts embarrassed by a close friend with disabilities, and caves in to bullies because she wants to be part of the popular crowd. DeeDee disappoints herself and must seek encouragement to do what she knows is right, modeling growth. The novel is filled with important issues involving immigration and acceptance of those who are different, though DeeDee’s cheeky narrative voice (“Holy jalapeño”) provides a great deal of levity. Commendably, Belford isn’t afraid to show the cruelty and confusion children evince when their lives are not going as planned.
A busy novel about the importance of compassion and learning to be true to one’s heart, with an endearing protagonist at its core . (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5107-2406-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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